World’s Wonder View Tower

The World’s Wonder View Tower is situated on the Great Plains just off I-70 in Genoa, Colorado.  The observation deck atop the tower was confirmed by Ripley’s Believe It or Not to be the highest point between New York and Denver.  Sadly, the late owner and proprietor Jerry Chubbuck passed away on August, 4, 2013, and the tower has been closed since then.  The extensive contents were auctioned off in 2014.  A preservation group has purchased the property and is planning to reopen it to the public.

The seven-story tower was built in 1926 by Charles W. Gregory and his partner Myrtle LeBow as a tourist attraction and way-station along US-24 and the Rock Island Railroad.  Car ownership in the U.S. tripled in the late 20s and early 30s, accompanied by an explosion in roadside businesses catering to the new fascination for tourist travel.  The tower makes the dubious claim of offering a view of six states, which was enough to draw crowds of visitors.  Business was brisk, and Gregory and LeBow added other amenities including a trading post, store, café, gas station, roadhouse, and a group of stone “grotto” rooms decorated in a variety of themes.

The Wonder View Tower thrived before and after WWII.  Jerry and Esther Chubbuck purchased the property in 1967.  Just eight year later in 1975, Interstate-70 opened, rerouting traffic south of the site.  Visits declined, but Jerry continued to operate the facility as a museum for his highly eclectic collection of antiquities and curiosities. The tower survives as a symbol of the rapidly expanding popularity of automobile tourism in the middle of the 20th century.

I saw the tower on my annual summer road trips out west when I travelledI-70.  Needless to say, it intrigued me, and I finally stopped there in March of 2000 on my way to a conference in Denver.  At that time I shot film photos, but on a visit in 2008 I was shooting digital.  With digital, there’s no reason to limit the number of images, and I shot 140 photos of the tower.  Now that Jerry is gone and the contents of the Tower Museum have been auctioned off, I am glad to have this historic archive.  Below is a selection of the images.  Scroll down below the gallery for a transcript of my journal entry describing the 2008 visit to the Tower.

Click on the first image to enlarge it and use the arrow buttons on your keyboard to scroll through the series, or on a touch screen, tap the right or left edge of the enlarged image.

Visiting the Tower
I keep a detailed journal of my summer travels, and the following entry is from Friday, June 13, 2008:

A sign on the front door said “OPEN,” but a padlock said it wasn’t.  I walked around the corner to the attached residence and knocked on the door.  The place was humble, with badly-stained white curtains obscuring the windows.  I waited a moment and knocked again, and after another minute an elderly man answered the door.  I recognized him from my previous visit eight years earlier.  He was sleepy, no doubt having awoken from a nap.  He seemed to have aged a lot since I saw him last.  I asked to see the tower, and he nodded and said “Let me get the key.”  He was pleasant, with a very gentle demeanor.  I waited in the doorway, and couldn’t resist looking inside.  The small living room and kitchen had a patina acquired from human beings existing in a closed space for a very long time with no scrubbing or repainting.  A sink in the back was piled with dirty dishes.  All of the kitchen fixtures dated to the 1950s or earlier.

The man reemerged and closed the door, and we walked around front to the main entrance.  He introduced himself as Jerry Chubbuck and explained with considerable pride that he has owned the World’s Wonder View Tower for over 40 years.  I said, “I remember you.  I visited the tower in 2000.”  He looked at me for a moment and said, “I don’t remember you, but my memory isn’t what it used to be.”  The fact that he even considered the possibility of remembering me indicates the declining numbers of tourists visiting the Tower in the intervening years.

Upon unlocking the door, Jerry gestured me inside.  A small sign said, “Admission, $1.00.”  That probably hasn’t changed in a while.  I paid the admission, and Jerry said that I’d get my dollar back if I bought something.  I wondered if they have anything for a dollar.

The World’s Wonder View Tower is mind-boggling in its scope and extent.  An online blurb explains that the tower was “the promotional invention of Colorado’s version of P.T. Barnum, C.W. Gregory, and his partner, Myrtle LeBow.”  Known locally as “The Genoa Tower,” the structure includes a seven-story tower of wood and concrete plus a complex of 22 ground-floor rooms, some built “grotto-style” from mortared stone with vaulted ceilings.  The rooms are packed wall-to-wall with displays of minerals, arrowheads, bones, antique guns, old tools, Indian artifacts and countless curiosities and oddities including an 18”-diameter amethyst geode illuminated from within, a partial mammoth skeleton, and a stuffed, mounted two-headed calf.

During my visit in 2000 I did not climb the tower.  It looks pretty run-down from the outside.  But since it has survived for another eight years, I decided to risk it, and to do it before exploring the other rooms.  The route from the main room to the base of the tower passes through a long narrow gallery packed with a bizarre range of collectibles and oddities, although the primary focus in this room seems to be antique tools.  The walls and even the ceiling are completely covered.

The room at the base of the tower is crammed with an especially eclectic variety of oddities, but I decided to leave that until after climbing the tower.  The staircases hug the outer walls.  The first flight leads to a room painted a bright medium blue.  I was surprised to find it filled with random and relatively worthless odds and ends, including  prints and oil paintings of the kind you find decorating motel rooms, broken furniture, cheap vases, chipped crockery, canning jars, a box of old shoes, broken down toys, assorted random stuff.  An enormous paper-mache relief model of Pikes Peak fills one corner.

The room on the third floor is painted bright yellow.  It contains a disappointingly similar array of commonplace odds and ends, with just enough space to walk through the room to the next flight of stairs.

The room on the fourth floor is smaller yet and painted a brilliant blood-red, even more surreal, and once again is furnished with junk.  The windows are fogged with grease and dust, offering a filtered view of the surrounding farm fields.

The whole tower is tapered.  Each floor is slightly smaller than the one below until you get to the fifth, which expands outwards to considerable size with concrete buttresses supporting the overhang.  The inspiration for the design comes from classic wood-frame water towers.  Unnervingly, the flight from the fourth to fifth floors is attached to the outside of the building.  The reason for that seems questionable. If the stairs from the fourth floor were within the room, they would come out in the middle of the larger room on the fifth floor.  I can’t see how that would be a problem, but instead, they hung the stairs on the outside.  Inside these rooms the structure seems quite sturdy, but I must admit to some nervousness as I climbed that flight to the fifth floor.

The fifth floor is surprisingly large, with windows all the way around.  It is also painted vivid red, but the wall space is covered with so many photographs, paintings, old license plates, and other miscellaneous flat things tacked up everywhere that you can barely see any red paint.  Once again, a motley assortment of furniture and other disconnected odds and ends fill the room.  It is a complete mystery why anyone went to the considerable trouble to haul all this ordinary stuff up four narrow flights of stairs.  It seems like someone was obsessed with the idea of covering the walls and filling the rooms with almost anything rather than decorating the place tastefully and purposefully.  Or, to state it simpler, the furnishings were the result of an irrational obsession rather than a logical objective.

Near the center of the room I climbed a steep, well worn ladder to the sixth floor.  I emerged into a very small room with large windows, like a classic observation tower.  The interior is painted white with bright red trim, and the windows make it glaringly bright compared to the floors below.  It’s a small room, and refreshingly empty.

At one edge of the room, an even steeper, narrower ladder leads up to the seventh and final level, an open observation platform on the roof.  The portal to the roof had been left open by the last visitor.  I am tall and only slightly overweight, and was barely able to squeeze my shoulders through the opening.  Someone slightly larger wouldn’t make it.

I climbed the ladder and emerged on the roof, where two very ratty stuffed mannequins in folding aluminum chairs were having a perpetual party.   It would have been a shame to climb all the way up here to discover nothing more than the view.  I had spotted these mannequins from the ground, and up close they do not disappoint.

The roof is officially the seventh story, and is a hell of a long way up.  The railing does not look reassuring, and I suffer from vertigo.  I stayed towards the center and shot photos.  The reality is that the top of the World’s Wonder View Tower offers a 360-degree panoramic view of not much.  It’s the Great Plains, and although the tower is built at the edge of a high plateau dropping off to the west, it overlooks a very large expanse of gently-rolling plains.  I gazed into the distance, looking for something, anything, but could see only more of the same.

The little brochure given out to visitors includes some bold claims.  It says, “Believe it or not, six states can be seen from the Tower: Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, New Mexico, and South Dakota.  Also, the Grand Tetons, 500 miles distant, proved by Ripley.  Highest point from East Coast to West Coast outside of the Rocky Mountains – 5,751 feet elevation.”

The implied challenge in “believe it or not” is warranted.  I choose “not.” Highest point outside the Rocky Mountains?  Whoever wrote the brochure hasn’t been out much.  They seem to have overlooked all of the Great Basin mountain ranges and the Sierra Nevada, assuming that once you get past the Rockies, a gentle downhill slope leads all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  And there is no chance that you can see the Grand Tetons from here.  Over a distance of 500 miles, the curvature of the earth would place them well below the horizon.  And regarding seeing six states, how would you know?  Other than the Rockies to the west, which can supposedly be seen on a clear day and are in the same state as the Tower, everything else is rolling plains extending to oblivion in all directions.

The ever-present Great Plains wind was blowing hard, so I didn’t stay on top very long.  I gingerly made my way down the ladders, noticing that the center of the rungs was worn down to half their original thickness from thousands of visitors climbing up and down.  I was especially light-footed descending the staircase hanging from the fifth floor, but the rest of the way was easy.

Back on the ground floor, I examined the contents of the large room at the base of the tower.  There are glass cases filled with Native American stone tools and collections of old pharmacy jars.  There are old wood wagon parts, and various stuffed and mounted animal heads including Moose and Elk.  There’s the promised two-headed calf, which seems authentic.  The brochure says that it is one of three two-headed calves in the collection, but an online write-up by a previous visitor claims two three-headed calves.  Can’t people read?  Or count?  Maybe it’s just the American inclination to sensationalize.  More is better. I haven’t yet encountered an online claim of a single six-headed calf.

Jerry wandered in as I was finishing my circuit of the room.  He pointed out highlights in the collection as we proceeded back towards the entry room.  I could tell that showing off the tower and his collection is the joy of his life.  At this point, perhaps it ‘s the only joy of his life.  Otherwise, why do this?

Jerry has a compulsion towards bad puns and corny jokes.  Special gimmicks are secreted here and there, and he delights in pulling them out for visitors.  Jerry pointed to a well-worn and much-repaired cigar box emblazoned “OPEN ME!” on top.  I reached out and opened the lid, and a spring-loaded rubber lizard with bared teeth reared up at me.  Jerry chuckled.

Aside from climbing the tower, the whole routine seemed familiar, like some kind of surreal and slightly-disturbing déjà-vu.  It dawned on me that eight years ago I went through the same thing with the spring-loaded lizard box.  I had a momentary vision of Jerry stuck in a space-time anomaly, going through the exact same performance with every visitor who puts up with it, decade after decade, like some kind of Twilight Zone endless-loop nightmare, or Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.”  This place is like that.

Among the most impressive details of the Wonder View Tower is the back wall of the big entry room.  It is completely covered with framed collections of arrowheads under glass.  That is no exaggeration.  There are thousands of arrowheads.  The brochure claims that the Tower Museum contains over 20,000 Indian artifacts, and I believe it.  I inquired, and Jerry explained that all of the arrowheads were collected within fifty miles of the Tower.  For most people in North America, a found arrowhead is something very special, a wonderful relic of the past, fashioned by the skilled hands of indigenous Native Americans.  But on the Great Plains, finding an arrowhead was a fairly mundane daily occurrence.  Standard farming practices until the late 20th century encouraged farmers to plow their fields right after the fall harvest, leaving loose soil exposed through the winter until spring planting.  Unless the ground was covered with snow, every good wind carried off a layer of dirt, leaving behind the heavy matter.  As we all know from the lore of the Dust Bowl, big dust storms were a common occurrence on the Great Plains throughout the first half of the 20th century.  After a good blow, a farmer could walk his land and pick up dozens or even hundreds of arrowheads.  Every farmer had boxes of collected points, or mounted frames hanging on the walls of his home.  They became ordinary, and the children or grandchildren saw even less value in the collections and sold them to C. W. Gregory or Jerry Chubbuck for cheap.

People today are incredulous that arrowheads could be so abundant.  Consider that before westward expansion, the entire Great Plains was mixed shortgrass and tallgrass prairie.  The thick, established grass cover and sod would effectively conceal stray arrows and loose arrowheads.  Prairie fires periodically burned off the grass, but the arrowheads accumulating over millennia became embedded in sod from successive generations of vegetation.

With 19thth century settlement of the Great Plains, farmers plowed the prairie and created the conditions for the epic dust storms that uncovered the bounty of arrowheads.  Consider the reality of indigenous hunter-gatherers wandering the Great Plains for 10,000 years and losing arrows and arrowheads in the tall grasses, and you begin to get some idea of the bounty of arrowheads still embedded in the sod or ground wherever it wasn’t plowed.  Jerry said that in the early 20th century after a good dust storm, a committed person could collect a hundred arrowheads in a single day.

Amidst the abundance of ordinary and odd items in the Tower Museum, there are many treasures.  The sheer quantity of interesting and valuable stuff boggles the mind.  I personally have visited plenty of exceptional antique and second-hand stores, and a few eccentric small museums resulting from the collecting and archiving endeavors of a committed individual.  The entire Tower Museum complex stands out for many reasons.

At this point in time, Jerry seems to be hanging onto the tail end of a good thing while barely scraping by in his humble attached apartment.  I wonder if he even realizes what a goldmine he has.  Without making much of a dent in the collections, a savvy person could list a few things on eBay now and then.  They could in a reasonable amount of time become wealthy, ready for comfortable retirement.  That might be an impossibility for Jerry.  He might be too dug-in, committed to a deeply entrenched routine as he waits for crowds of tourists to reappear.

Moving east through the connected rooms, I entered an unexpected fantasy world of chambers, some built of stone with vaulted ceilings.  The largest is the former roadhouse, and contains the strangest displays.  A male and female mannequin sit at a round table.  The mannequins are homemade, probably paper mache, and very much the worse for wear.  The man wears a cowboy hat, and the woman’s hair looks like some kind of repurposed black brush splayed out as an improvised wig.  Her right hand rests on the table, grasping a six-gun, while the other holds up a group of playing cards.  The man’s left hand holds a liquor bottle, and the right, like the woman’s left, lays on the table with a revolver.  A spread of cards is on the table in front of him, face-up, as if he has called her hand.  It’s not a reassuring tableau.  Enormous moose and elk heads mounted overhead survey the scene with vacant glass eyes.

A stage occupies one end of the room, and Jerry explained that this was once a popular stop on two-lane Highway 24 that once paralleled the railroad tracks just north of the Tower.  Now the old highway and slow pace of life have been supplanted by Interstate-70 and people in a hurry.  The World’s Wonder View Tower still makes an intriguing sight for passers-by, but few take the time to stop.  No doubt the obviously seedy appearance of the Tower and surrounding buildings offer little encouragement to potential visitors.

The roadhouse stage is an oddity in itself.  The surface is steeply canted backwards away from the audience, and I could not figure out whether it was intentional or the slow work of structural entropy.  Jerry claims it was designed and built that way specifically to prevent drunken performers from falling onto the dance floor below.  I think it would have the opposite effect, offering a far greater challenge to remain upright for anyone under the influence.  Several strips of non-skid tape make some attempt to adapt to the incline, but I can imagine what it would be like with a few drinks spilled on the surface.  More likely, the slope results from gradual deterioration of the substructure, and it does give pause wondering about structural integrity elsewhere in the establishment.

Rooms at the far eastern end of the Tower complex once housed the kitchen and dining area.  It was no surprised to find them crammed with an eclectic assortment including some nice collectibles and vast amounts of average-flea-market-quality kitchen implements and tableware.  The sheer extent of stuff is mind-boggling.  The comedian Steven Wright says, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”  In 1967, Jerry Chubbuck accepted the challenge.

One of the grottoes is called “The Indian Room.”  It contains a collection of paintings and pictographs supposedly created by Lakota-Sioux Princess Ravenwing.  Many of the rocks cemented into the pillars, walls, and ceiling are decorated with multi-color pictographs, and several large embedded stones feature elaborate paintings.  They might be real.  Who can say?  I am sure that Lakota Sioux Princess Ravenwing is long gone, and it’s a fair guess whether or not her presence at the World’s Wonder View Tower was ever officially documented.  The pictographs might have been painted by C. W. Gregory or Jerry Chubbuck, or some out-of-work farm hand with an artistic bent.  The opportunity for such conjecture is perhaps one of the best things about the Wonder View Tower.

Jerry was waiting when I returned to the main entrance.  On the counter, a metal cookie tin was filled with reproduction arrowheads, probably made in China.  I fingered them for a moment, but then said “Jerry, I would like to buy a real arrowhead, one that was picked up by some farmer walking his land after a dust storm.”  Jerry eyed me for a minute and said “I don’t usually sell those.”  I waited patiently, and he apparently reconsidered.  It was hard to tell whether this too was another part of his practiced routine.  He turned around and opened a cabinet behind the counter.  I leaned over and glanced inside.  There were disorganized stacks of what appeared to be dozens more of the framed arrowhead collections, similar to the ones mounted on the walls, all in dissimilar frames and display panels.  Who knows how many he has in storage?

Jerry took a mounted frame from the top of the stack and set it on the front counter.  From a drawer he retrieved a pair of slip-joint pliers and extracted a series of rusty pins that held the cover on the frame.  Just the effort involved in pulling those pins revealed that they had been there for a very long time, semi-locked in place by the summer humidity.

Removing the glass, Jerry looked up and said “Which one would you like?”  Initially it felt a bit like violating a piece of history, but considering the sheer quantity of such framed collections and the apparent lack of real provenance on any of them, I chose a fairly large arrowhead in a buff stone.  Jerry asked $30, and I didn’t hesitate to pay his price.  He wrapped my arrowhead in newspaper and tape, and I pocketed it.

For an arrowhead with no provenance or proof of authenticity, $30 is steep, but I have my own provenance related to this time and place.  That includes strange, delightful Jerry Chubbuck and the whole multi-media experience of the World’s Wonder View Tower.  Even if the stockpile of framed collections piled in the cabinet is a well-orchestrated fakery to capitalize on gullible tourists (or maybe more so if this is true), my arrowhead still represents the whole aura and story of the place, and will be a treasure.

Anticipating my departure, Jerry beckoned me to an nearby cabinet for a final rite.  He pulled out an odd-looking C-shaped fixture and slipped it on.  His forearm appeared to be pierced by a bayonet, half protruding from each side.  I was grateful for the opportunity to photograph him with one of his cheesy gimmicks.   Jerry’s normal facial expression is rather weary, and it’s easy to understand why.  But as I took a picture, his smile was genuine.  It occurred to me that these moments might represent a bit of joy in what is otherwise a pretty lonely and repetitive life.  Even this little performance is part of the repetition, but repetitive parts of our lives can become cherished rituals.  If that’s the case, I am very glad to have provided some joy in Jerry’s day.  At the same time I felt a little anxious to leave the premises, for fear I might get sucked in as a permanent prop in the endless-loop space-time anomaly of the World’s Wonder View Tower.

Before leaving, I said, “I’d like to wander around outside and shoot more photos.” Jerry said, “Take your time.  There’s lots to see.”  He offered to return my dollar admission, but I declined.  I shook Jerry’s hand and headed out the door.

I am glad I took the time to documented the exterior of the complex.  As per Jerry’s recommendation, I took my time and walked the circumference of the grounds, shooting pictures of the building and checking out all the oddities left from the heyday of the establishment.  At the northwest corner of the property about 100 feet from the tower, two ancient outhouses are caught in the suspended motion of slow collapse.  One is far beyond utility.  The other looks like it might have been in use until recently, but is tilting at a precarious angle, curiously propped on the wrong side with a weathered gray fence post.  On the more derelict of the two, a rectangle of less-weathered wood is visible above the door.  The “MEN” sign had been removed and tacked above “WOMEN” on the other outhouse – a unisex bathroom ahead of its time.

The door hung partially open, seeking the lowest point determined by the tilt of the building.  Along the edge are eight hinges.  That got my attention, and a closer look revealed that the hinge pins had worn through to nothing on all but two hinges.  Each time a hinge failed, it was left it in place and a new one tacked on above or below.  I tried to imagine the number of times this door was opened and closed to wear through that many hinge pins.  No doubt the almost ever-present Great Plains wind had a lot to do with it.

Turning back towards the tower, I was startled by its appearance from this vantage point.  The town of Genoa is off to the east, the Interstate to the south, but no one sees it from the northwest except occasional farmhands plowing nearby fields.  This side has been left untouched for a long time, perhaps since the Interstate came through over 30 years ago.  It looks derelict, with peeling paint exposing bleached wood and crumbling concrete.  Had I seen it earlier from this angle, I doubt I would have trusted the structural integrity of the tower.

What is now the backside of the whole complex faces the grades of the railroad and former highway, and it is clear that this was once the front of the establishment.  Large, crude wood tables loaded with old bottles, rusty car parts, rocks and minerals, and other dubious “collectibles” date back four decades to a time before the Interstate came through.  Upon and between the objects on the tables, dust has settled heavily and weeds have taken root.

Closer to the old highway grade stands a large concrete stele-like structure with jagged stones embedded around the sides and top, and a large flat face front and back.  It’s what remains of an old advertising sign to draw in tourists passing by on Highway 24, but whatever message was once painted or mounted on the faces is long gone.  Beyond the old sign and lined up in a long row parallel to the highway grade, there’s an odd selection of objects.  It includes several brown enameled cast iron parlor stoves, a large metal cabinet, a stack of deformed galvanized washtubs, an ancient cement mixer, and a pair of wagon axles with iron spoke wheels.  I could imagine the life of the tower just before the Interstate came through, when people were already in more of a hurry, less inclined to stop at “tourist traps.”  Jerry was diversifying, offering this motley assortment of items for sale.  At that point, the World’s Wonder View Tower had apparently evolved into a glorified second-hand store, with the museum and six-state view of secondary interest to most passers-by.  And so here this stuff sits, whatever remained unsold.  The place has changed little since then except for the effects of age – the peeling paint and accumulation of dust and weeds.

Circling around the east end of the building back to the parking area, I encountered more rickety tables displaying similar “flea-market” odds and ends, with only slightly less dust and weeds.  But the centerpiece is two huge derelict American sedans from the sixties, parallel-parked out front.  The tires are flat and the vehicles have settled in long-term.  The interiors completely filled with antique bottles turning purple from the sunlight.  It’s an eloquent statement, a decaying exclamation point at the end of the tale of the tower.  What more could you say about this place?

Back on the interstate heading west from Genoa, the Great Plains roll gently but relentlessly to the horizon.  For a thoughtful and observant person, the immensity and timelessness of this landscape necessarily illuminates the entire span of human existence as a tiny spec on the life of the land.  In the grand scheme of things, the World’s Wonder View Tower is of little consequence, like so many works of humankind that will amount to no more.  Here and now, I find it slightly tragic that such an expenditure of creative energy and hard labor has come to so little, fading into obscurity as an anomaly in the peripheral vision of destination-minded travelers speeding by on I-70.  “Jesus, Bernice, did you see that?  What the hell was that weird building?”  “Was” is the keyword.  Seconds later, the traveler’s focus has shifted, with no more thought of this oddity.  I experienced a momentary vision of donning a sandwich board at the appropriate highway off-ramp and flagging down passers-by.  “Don’t Miss the World’s Wonder View Tower!  One of a Kind!  Experience the Amazing View of Six States!  See the Two-Headed Calf!”